Well over the past few years, we had noticed some shocking controversies and appalling reviews from Rockstar, EA and Activision. For the sake for this topic to be short, I won’t be explaining on to much detail that most players know, like Rockstar trying to kill OpenIV as well that EA killed support for BF2, BF2142, BF Heroes and BFF2P, as most players know this already.

First up is Rockstar, most of you know that Rockstar is owned by Take Two Software. But the main game company is Rockstar North specifically as they had made a few notable games with overwhelming reviews – as well certain controversial reports… Also Rockstar North didn’t exist until 2002 where it was formally know as Acme Software, followed by DMA Design near 1987 founded by David Jones, Russell Kay, Steve Hammond and Mike Dailly in Dundee, Scotland. David Jones had devised and created Lemmings in 1991 which had excellent reviews and became a exclusive game for the Amiga 500 Package in 1991. He also devised Grand Theft Auto and produce the first two of GTA, but not GTA3 onwards. David Jones and DMA Design parted to go separate ways and was tooken over by Rockstar and rebranded as Rockstar North in 2002. In GTA3 you would notice some DMA “leftovers”, because when you play GTA3 in Francis International Airfield, you will notice on the Jet Cruiser’s tail “DMAir”. Moving onto Rockstar North in particular, Leslie Benzies became the lead developer for GTA3 to GTA5 until he left in 2016. As you know Rockstar had made games that had an overwhelming Metacritic score of around 94% - mainly for GTA San Andreas. Also I’ve been trying out some Mods and GFX improvement addons for GTA3, GTA:VC and GTA:SA. However there are few things you need to consider and take account: Game Saves, Downgrading, using GTA Tools and commitment. For the saves for GTA3, you should have no problem with it for modding but for Vice City and San Andreas, there are some complications which I will explain later. For GTA3, they are some essential patches and fixes that you need to try out: 13AG’s Widescreen Fix, Silent’s Patches as well maybe downgrading all of the those 3 GTA games v1. Because if you want GTA3 as well as GTAVC and GTASA to support in widescreen resolution, then download 13AG’s Widescreen Fix. Silent Patches for those 3 games mentioned recently, are important for those hidden bugs as well to help GTA3 get the 100% Completion as Rockstar didn’t exactly fix those long term remaining bugs. And why should you downgrade those GTA games (excluding GTA4 and GTA5) to v1, you may ask? Well for modding like HD GFX as well some useful mods like Vice Cry, Multi Theft Auto, Helicopter & Plane Mods for GTA3, those mods are more compatible on running on gta3.exe as well as gta-vc.exe and gta-sa.exe in v1. Also for playing saves, if you had owned a Retail CD-Rom of GTA3, VC and SA, and had bought the Steam version, well you may realise that those saves from your Retail version won’t work mainly on Vice City nor San Andreas. I’m not sure why but it’s maybe that Steam did some tiny modifications to the latest build version for DRM as well support Steam Overlay. OK, but is there a way to convert my saves for me to play those older build versions for v1, you may ask? Well yes there is! If you had saved your GTAVC or GTASA saves from the Steam versions and want the to work on the v1 versions, the best way is to go to http://gtasnp.com to convert them. They can also allow you to select which Script/SCM Version you want to convert – whereas v1 should be available. But firstly you maybe best to backup your saves by using GameSave Manager and storing your backups in DropBox or Google Drive. That way you won’t have to worry about your hard earned efforts being corrupted or lost for GTA. But just to stay on this topic, what about the rise and fall of Rockstar? Well as far as I know the former lead developer Leslie Benzies went on hiatus on 1st of September 2014 and left. I can assume that Benzies from Rockstar North and the board directors of Take 2 and Rockstar NYC had signifiant disagreements and therefore came to a decision where Benzies had no option but to quit. With Rockstar losing its key employee as well making some unnecessary decisions like banning players for modding GTA5 as well cutting support for OpenIV; not to forget leaving Games for Windows Live, as Microsoft had discontinued Windows Live network. But also there is a fix for GTA4 by using Xliveless, but it won’t allow you to play Online Multiplayer in GTA4. So what will happen to Rockstar, will it try to salvage as much of their key employees as well hope their GTA6 project will prove a better successor? Time will tell…

Moving onto Activision, you know for sure that Activision and its key developer, Infantry Ward for making Call of Duty games, as well publishing other games you might of heard of. But for now lets talk on Call of Duty games as well look on how things became dicey for Activision. First up lets look at Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty Infinite Ward. CoD4 was released in 2007 and had an overwhelming Metascore of 92%. Reason is because of its nice GFX, online ranks, dedicated server support as well being mod friendly – such as ProMod and CoD4X. Sadly CoD4 aged badly as well lost too much support such as PunkBuster and the Masterserver for CoD4 is corrupt. But those can be fixed by using CoD4X v1.8 patch for both the client and the server. But is the Remastered version better or is it? Well the answer is...not really. CoD4R as well as CoDIW have a very poor netcode and terrible Input Lag. All I now is that Infantry Ward had laid off its key employees recently and decided to pursue on new opportunities and hire new employees, but doesn’t appear to have the same knowledge and experience on netcode as well optimising the latest games for less lag. “How do you know for a fact, APG Dude?” as I would anticipate you would ask. Well I did played both CoD4 as well as CoD4R and noticed an extra delay on my Hit Indicator and my Hit Reg wasn’t better in CoD4R nor for CoDIW. Also CoD4R isn’t mod friendly and doesn’t appear to support dedicated servers. I don’t know if Activision had stopped supporting Dedicated Servers nowadays unless they don’t want their servers files exposed for hackers to experiment and bypass their security to exploit the servers. And if you want to know how bad CoD4R lags more than CoD4 original, have a look at this video and check the graph:-

And last but not least, EA, and yes we all know much on EA’s reputation and how they made things go bad to worse. EA was founded by Trip Hawkins in 1982 but left in 1994. EA did publish some great games during the 1990s like Desert Strike series, Road Rash series, Theme Park, Medal of Honor, FIFA series, Need For Speed as well as PGA Tour Golf. But how did they end up going downhill? Well it maybe because they cannot keep up with the payroll for their employees and been too forceful for them to be more productive, that they seem to had some staffing problems as well on some abuse. We all know for sure EA will do almost anything to make more profit as well take things to far. Also some of the EA companies that took over like Bullfrog which made Theme Park as well as Theme Hospital was rebranded as EA UK in 2001 then became known as Criterion Games in Guildford, England. Criterion Games had made great games for EA like Burnout Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2010, NFS:Most Wanted 2012 as well as Star Wars BattleFront 2. But main EA developer we are going to talk about is Digital Illusions CE or DICE as we are here to discuss mainly on the fall of EA. DICE was established in 1992 and had made Pinball computer games like Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies for the Amiga. Then they had produce BattleField games in the 2000s like BF1942 as well as BF2, BF2142, BFBC2, BF3 and so on. But how did they end up going downhill for those games? Well BF2 and BF2142 were dependant on GameSpy Network as they server browser and query was operated by GameSpy. But sadly GameSpy was took over by Glu Mobile in 2012 and decided to shutdown all of GameSpy’s network where it was required for BF2, BF2142 as well as Nintendo Wifi Connect as they were closed in 31st of May 2014. Some BF2 veterans refused to let BF2 die and established a Revival network such as BF2Hub and Battlelog.co to preserve the network and BFHQ stats for players to continue playing BF2 as well rank the BF2 servers. Sadly EA had asked Battlelog.co to stop powering the BF2 servers as well provide the downloads and fixes for BF2 in 27th of October 2017 as EA asked to “stop distributing and using their intellectual property.” [APG] had donated $250 for Battlelog.co as [APG] was established as a BF2 clan near 2005 and wanted to help continue its legacy.

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Battlelog.co had spent a lot of effort trying to keep alive and EA made a extremely silly and suicidal decision by killing their own older games. I personally feel sorry for Battlelog.co as they had no choice but to stop supporting BF2. I don’t know if BF2Hub will end up in the same boat as Battlelog.co but time will tell. Also what about the latest BF games? Well they seem to be doing alright as BF4 and BF1 are now supporting on a higher tickrate server. But EA’s customer support and Origin are not as satisfactory as you may think. Because their prizes as well allowing BF players to claim their Veteran status are not as reliable to claim. Besides I was unable to claim my BF2 and BF1942 Veteran status in neither Origin or in the Battlefield main websites. You know what I think about them? I think they are trying to guilt trip us for not using BF and Origin as frequency as we can. What I mean is they want players to buy and hook up by making their games more addictive as well making them more active online. But it’s not our fault that we cannot afford their overpriced games, not to forget that BF3 wasn’t compatible for Windows XP owners in 2011. With respect I do know most players around the globe are in poverty as well living in poor countries, and it is important for [APG] to be more diverse friendly as well provide the entertainment for players to enjoy in our servers. Of course we know for sure that EA is trying to make more money as well make players pay to play as well stay in touch with EA with extreme force. I don’t know when BFBC2 and BF3 will be taken off the market like BF1942, BF2 and BF2142 did, but god knows when. Also if you want to know what is tickrate you can find out below here:

So after what we have learnt from EA, Rockstar and Activision - there is a few curious questions:-

>> Will they redeem themselves for being too ruthless and admit on their mistakes?>> Will they make new breakthroughs to revolutionise their games with so many employees?>> Could it be the end for more of their key workers?>> And will YOU buy their latest overpriced games in the future

If you have any comments or questions, please post them below. Thanks.

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Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:31 am

Rocker54

Joined: Sat Jul 15, 2017 10:42 amPosts: 9

Re: The fall of Rockstar, EA and Activision

Overpaying and getting ripped off is gaming now. There ain't a single flawless game out, nowadays. And with flaws I mean: bugs, lack of quality control, a game needing DLCs to be played at its best, and so on. So, if you want to game nowadays, you gotta get rid of your honor and of a number of dollars often close to 100 from your wallet. That's just how it goes, sadly. This is definitely not limited to the companies you mentioned.

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Sun Nov 19, 2017 2:53 am

Bjorngomes

[APG] Member

Joined: Sat Jun 23, 2012 1:21 pmPosts: 1190Location: Netherlands

Re: The fall of Rockstar, EA and Activision

it's dangerous to go alone, take this meme.

(srsly robo how do you post videos like that cuz i forgot)

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Last edited by RoboCop on Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:29 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Check your edited post and see. You missed "www."

Sun Nov 19, 2017 12:12 pm

sgt-ryan

[APG] Server Admin

Joined: Fri Jan 17, 2014 5:01 pmPosts: 335Location: England

Re: The fall of Rockstar, EA and Activision

Doesn't help as well that microtransactions are in most games now which causes a lot of outrage from other people the most recent one to pop up is DICE's Star wars Battlefront 2 as people could purchase loot boxes and get cards to upgrade their characters and some people that don't want to spend money on them would be at a huge disadvantage. This lead to EA getting death threats and a lot of backlash for this and EA have responded by suspending microtransactions in their game. So it looks like people are starting to fight back against this.

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Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:38 pm

SkyRevolt

Joined: Sat Nov 18, 2017 8:21 amPosts: 3Location: Ph

Re: The fall of Rockstar, EA and Activision

Activision is just the publisher of Call of Duty and game developer's of Call of Duty is divided into slate's where developer's are switched out yearly from Treyarch, Infinty Ward, and Sledgehammer in that order. Just wanna say that Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare developed by Infinity Ward had fleshed out microtransaction's first then releasing it's leaderboards and Call of Duty:WWII developed by Sledgehammer had it's component's of gameplay fleshed out first and has yet to release it's microtransaction's to this day and this only show's that developer's are the one's responsible of what happen's to the game's. Oh, and next year's game is being developed by Treyarch.

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